Advancements in the field of digital media industry, digital media content rights management, and television and broadcasting sector have led to development of various technologies and broadcasting platforms that are revolutionizing the way consumer devices access and consume media content. Usually, broadcasting platforms refer to the types of networks that are used to deliver the media content to the consumers. Currently, all the broadcasting platforms, such as analog terrestrial broadcast, digital terrestrial broadcast, direct-to-home satellite broadcast, cable, Internet Protocol (IP), and over-the-top television (OTT), compete and strive to increase their appeal in order to gain wider audience.
The television viewing market is no longer exclusively concerned with whether media content services are viewed on a dedicated television or another device capable of playing media content. As a result of penetration of new technologies in the television and broadcasting sector, it is evident that the future success of television broadcasting will be dependent on the ability of a network provider to simplify access to the content that consumers demand.
Increased competition has led the broadcast providers, the media content owners, and the media content re-distributors to handle multiple channels, associated media content rights, and modes of delivery at the same time, which in turn have added unparalleled levels of complexity. This requires installation of large infrastructures and resources to maintain uninterrupted content delivery for existing channel and also meet the ever-increasing demand of new channels.
Currently, clearance and negotiations of media content rights are very time consuming and backed by readily inaccessible/unusable data. Further, multiple content libraries by various entities, require separate subscriptions and make it difficult for users to navigate to content of their choice freely without having individual subscription. From content consumer's perspective, there are multiple content libraries available from different service providers that are increasing in number day-by-day, thereby making it difficult for the content consumers to add and manage different subscriptions to consume the content of their choice. Furthermore, third-party measurement of viewership of a media content may be costly, myopic, and often not available for all platforms. There is no mechanism to precisely track media content rights and royalties for various entities. Further, isolated media content catalogs and third-party dependencies to estimate viewership for a media content, such as a TV show, to plan for future advertisement inventory needs and obligations, increase complexities. This in turn increases re-work and requires installation of large infrastructures and resources to maintain uninterrupted media content delivery for existing channels and limits the ability of the broadcaster or distributor to change content and/or provide digital rights management (DRM) licenses for desired media content in real time or near-real time.
Thus, a new and advanced ecosystem may be desirable where all the stakeholders, such as the content owners, the content distributors and re-distributors, gateways, and the end consumers, can functionally interact with each other quickly and securely for acquisition, re-distribution, enforcement, and overall tracking of content rights and DRM licenses to provide simplified and customized playback and consumption of media content.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present disclosure as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.